SOLSC '18 Day Four: Up and away

The feeling was glorious, however brief.  Some nights, I launched from my bed, slipping through the roof as if it wasn't there, hovering over my house and circling the field beyond until I returned to bed.

At other times I was standing in a forest, and felt myself push off from the ground.  I could float several feet off the ground, zooming down hiking trails and around trees, as if some invisible force was keeping me afloat.  

Always, I would wake up the next morning convinced I could fly.  

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We left Naples, Italy and moved to California the summer before my fifth grade year.  I didn't want to leave Naples; it's the first time I remember crying over a move in our peripatetic military life.  My parents bought a house in the suburbs of San Jose, and my brother and I walked to the neighborhood school.  

We must have been the only military family there.  When one of my classmates asked where I was from, I said that I had lived on three continents; they didn't know what a continent was.  I was always the outsider during those two long years, playing mostly by myself at recess.  The only friend I can recall is Marco, the boy who lived across the street.  His mother had lupus and didn't go outside much, but she would make us delicious flour tortillas on the mornings we accompanied Marco to school, the butter dripping down my forearm as we walked.

My teachers, Ms. Doi and Mrs. Gize, were points of light during those years.  Mrs. Gize and my mom became friends when my mom started working as a classroom assistant; we went out to her house in the country a few times.  Mr. and Mrs. Gize had fruit trees and a room full of books--a piece of heaven to me.  But I never did fit in at school, or in our neighborhood.

I was miserable in San Jose.  
Maybe that's why I wanted to fly away.